CASE STUDY
TransUnion Interactive Raises Reporting
Efficiency with HP IO Accelerator
Credit and information management company uses SanDisk® powered blades to slash reporting times while
minimizing server footprint
The Challenge
Solution Focus
• Oracle Database
• Financial Industry
Summary of Benefits
• 6-9x faster reporting
• Performance of several shelves of
disks per HP IO Accelerator card
• Easy implementation
• High ROI from offloading reporting
off SAN onto HP IO Accelerator cards
• Best price-to-performance value
TransUnion Interactive, Inc. (TUI) is a consumer subsidiary of TransUnion. With
TransUnion Interactive, businesses can better acquire customers, strengthen longterm customer value and increase their bottom line. Through various sites, including
TransUnion.com, consumers can benefit from online educational materials and easyto-use tools designed to help them manage and control their finances.
TransUnion Interactive’s IT department maintains a reporting environment in which
the company gathers information from all of its websites. Examples include number
of users visited, number of visits per user, which users pulled reports, statistics
around monetary profiles, and so forth.
As the number of users and data volume began to grow, generating reports took an
increasingly long time. Infrastructure Architect Tim Bojorquez told us, “Generating
reports on our storage-based system took upwards of 30-45 minutes. With so
many jobs being run daily, some business users were not receiving their reports until
the afternoon.”
TUI’s Director of Infrastructure and Architecture Ramdas Kenjale, worked with
Tim and his team to look for ways that TUI could cost-effectively improve the
performance of its reporting system to ensure employees were armed with the
information they needed to make decisions when they arrived in the morning.
The Solution
Tim told us he had investigated SanDisk’s Fusion ioMemory™ ioDrive® cards several
years earlier. He was impressed by the performance, but it did not fit within the
efficient HP blade architecture they had standardized on. “We needed a solid-state
solution that would fit into our blade architecture,” Tim said. “When we heard the
HP IO Accelerator mezzanine product was available, we knew we could get the
performance we needed. We implemented the HP BL680 server with the maximum
PCIe slots and leveraged the Fusion ioMemory products’ full capacity.”
Powering Reporting Performance
To implement the system, TUI installed the HP IO Accelerator cards into the
reporting blade server and moved the reporting databases off the back-end storage
and onto the SanDisk-powered system. The results spoke for themselves.
“Reporting jobs went from going across the network to a hard disk-based NFS
system to solid-state media located within the blade servers themselves,” Tim
said. “Generating reports went from taking 30 to 45 minutes to about five minutes
running off the HP IO Accelerator cards.”
Reporting Time
With SanDisk
6-9X
5 minutes
Without SanDisk
30-45 minutes
IMPROVEMENT
“Reports run four to five times faster, at a minimum, than they used to,” Ramdas
stated. “What this means is that everyone who uses these reports for their work—
from Accounting to Marketing—has their reports at the beginning of the day.
This means they are equipped with timely information to help them make the
best decisions.”
Quick and Easy Implementation
TUI was also pleased with the ease of implementing the Fusion ioMemory products.
“Generating reports went from
taking 30 to 45 minutes off
the back-end storage to about
five minutes running off the
HP IO Accelerator cards.”
Tim Bojorquez,
Infrastructure Architect,
TransUnion Interactive
“Our storage-based reporting environment was already built on blades,” Tim told us.
“A key factor in our decision to purchase the HP IO Accelerator cards was that we
didn’t have to worry about redesigning our system. Implementing them required a
simple installation and moving the data around a bit.”
Excelling in Efficiency
TUI’s HP blade system was designed to maximize performance while saving
maintenance, floor space, and energy costs. Adding HP IO Accelerator cards to the
mix took their ROI to a new level.
“The ROI on the HP IO Accelerator cards is considerable. Without SanDisk, the IOPS
necessary to support fast reporting under our current query load would have taken
shelves of capacity,” Tim said. “We would have needed 10-12 shelves of disk storage
and three times the money to equal the IOPS capabilities three HP IO Accelerator
cards achieved with a single blade server. SanDisk was not only faster, but more
cost effective.”
“The HP IO Accelerator cards are less expensive than competing solid-state
products when priced on performance,” Ramdas added. “Performance was our
primary goal, but the ioDrive cards enabled us to do more with less hardware, which
is always a benefit.”
System Overview
System Before
Database servers
Storage (NFS)
System After
Database servers
Storage (NFS)
3 x HP IO Accelerator
320GB cards
Database Servers
Database Servers
• 3 x blade servers quad-core 2.66GHz
• 1 x blade server, quad-core 2.4GHz
processor, 64GB RAM
processor, 96GB RAM
• OS: RHEL 5
• 3 x 320GB HP IO Accelerator cards
• Application: Oracle 11.2.01 in
• OS: RHEL 5
Oracle RAC
• Application: Oracle 11.2.01 standalone
Storage (NFS)
Storage (NFS)
• 4 shelves of 144GB, 10k RPM disks in
• 4 x 144GB, 10k RPM disks (500GB)
RAID-DP (~5.5TB)
Summary
Contact information
[email protected]
Western Digital Technologies, Inc.
951 SanDisk Drive
Milpitas, CA 95035-7933, USA
T: 1-800-578-6007
Western Digital Technologies, Inc. is the seller
of record and licensee in the Americas
of SanDisk® products.
SanDisk Europe, Middle East, Africa
Unit 100, Airside Business Park
Swords, County Dublin, Ireland
T: 1-800-578-6007
SanDisk Asia Pacific
Suite C, D, E, 23/F, No. 918 Middle
Huahai Road, Jiu Shi Renaissance Building
Shanghai, 20031, P.R. China
T: 1-800-578-6007
For more information, please visit:
www.sandisk.com/hp
At SanDisk, we’re expanding the possibilities of data
storage. For more than 25 years, SanDisk’s ideas
have helped transform the industry, delivering next
generation storage solutions for consumers and
businesses around the globe.
Implementing HP blade servers with HP IO Accelerator cards gave TUI the
following benefits:
• 6-9x faster reporting
• Performance of several shelves of disks per HP IO Accelerator card
• Easy implementation
• High ROI from offloading reporting off SAN onto HP IO Accelerator cards
• Best price-to-performance value
Tim is thrilled with the SanDisk-powered blade system and told us, “We just
purchased higher capacity HP IO Accelerator cards to grow the reporting
environment and look forward to evaluating several other I/O constrained areas
where the existing ones can be used.”
About the Customer
TransUnion Interactive, Inc. is a consumer subsidiary of TransUnion. As a global
leader in information and risk management, TransUnion creates advantages
for millions of people around the world by gathering, analyzing and delivering
information. For businesses, TransUnion helps improve efficiency, manage risk,
reduce costs and increase revenue by delivering high-quality data, and integrating
advanced analytics and enhanced decision-making capabilities. For consumers,
TransUnion provides the tools, resources and education to help manage their
credit health and achieve their financial goals. Through these and other efforts,
TransUnion is working to build stronger economies worldwide. Founded in 1968 and
headquartered in Chicago, TransUnion reaches businesses and consumers in
25 countries around the world.
The performance results discussed herein are based on internal TransUnion testing and use of the above referenced products. Results and performance may
vary according to configurations and systems, including drive capacity, system architecture and applications.
©2016 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. SanDisk is a trademark of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates, registered in the
United States and other countries. Fusion ioMemory, ioDrive, and others are trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. Other brand names
mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).